Tim Crudo quoted in "On Haag's Watch, White-Collar Cases Take Dive"
Tim Crudo is quoted in “On Haag’s Watch, White-Collar Cases Take Dive” by Julia Love, The Recorder
May 23, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO — The last time Silicon Valley was booming, the U.S. attorney’s office was in hot pursuit.
With Robert Mueller at the helm of the office from 1998 to 2001, a specialized team aggressively targeted corporate wrongdoing and insider trading fueled by the dot-com bubble. But with money coursing through the Valley once more, there’s been a curious quiet from U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag.
Many in the bar hoped that Haag, an Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe partner who served as Mueller’s white-collar chief, would bring about a renaissance in high-impact fraud cases as the Bay Area’s top federal prosecutor. But three years into her tenure, white-collar prosecutions have slumped nearly 40 percent, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research institute at Syracuse University that tracks criminal enforcement. Overall case numbers have also fallen, albeit less dramatically, according to TRAC.
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With new companies constantly cropping up, many of which aim to disrupt established industries and business practices, the Valley is a vexing region to police, lawyers say.
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“At the margin, there are more controls, and it makes it more difficult,” said former Northern District prosecutor Timothy Crudo, who is now a white-collar partner at Coblentz, Patch, Duffy and Bass. “But it’s not going to stop all fraud.”